There is a further striking discrepancy between the files and Wolfs account. The files contain nothing about Brandt's extra-marital affairs. In his memoirs, though, Wolf claims to know that 'Guillaume soon realised that Brandt's adultery was frequent and varied'. Then again, after Guillaume was unmasked, and the head of the Federal Criminal Police wrote his report on Brandt's private life, cataloguing what Wolf calls 'his affairs with journalists, casual acquaintances, and prostitutes', he claims that 'Guillaume had of course been telling us about this kind of behavior all along'. So perhaps the surviving files don't record the whole story.

The range of material on which the court case was based was narrow. The charge brought against the Guillaumes was the most serious possible: (schwerer Landesverraf - high treason. It would have been impossible to secure a conviction on this merely for passing on gossip and unspecified overheard remarks - or even documents, if no one knew what the documents were. So the case depended largely upon Guillaume's spontaneous admission at the moment of his arrest to being an 'officer' of the DDR, and also upon the only specific documents that he was known for certain to have handled - the teleprinter traffic on the Norwegian holiday.

There remains some doubt, however, as to whether any of this material ever reached East Berlin. In his memoirs Guillaume says that he didn't attempt to contact his controller during the holiday, but gives a very graphic and circumstantial account of how he arranged for the copies of all the documents in his possession to be photographed by a courier while he was making an overnight stop at a hotel in Sweden on the way back to Bonn. In the interview with Knopp, as we have seen, he withdraws his claim to have deliberately fooled Bauhaus into thinking that he was carrying the documents himself, but doesn't modify any other part of the story. All this is cast into doubt by Markus Wolfs memoirs, however. Wolf says that the copies were handed over by Christel to a courier called Anita at the Casselsruhe restaurant in Bonn, and that Anita, realising she was being followed, threw them into the Rhine. So he never received them, though he kept this fact from Guillaume so as not to hurt his pride. Konopatzky agrees that there is no trace of any of the Norwegian messages in the files.

Oddly, though, Wolf makes no reference at all to Guillaume's version of the handover, by way of the courier in the Swedish hotel. Even more oddly, perhaps, he recounts in some detail the contents of the three most important messages that Guillaume copied, but doesn't explain where the information came from; not from the Guillaumes' trial, plainly, where the evidence relating to this was given in camera. More oddly still, in a television interview with Guido Knopp for his programme on Guillaume, he says that the documents in the dispatch-box did reach East Berlin, though he refuses to say what happened to them.